I posted to the ElectroServer forums and quick as a flash, Teresa got back to me – apparently ElectroServer was running out of memory. But apparently that’s not surprising – all Java gives it is 64Mb by default! But before I could fix it I had to stop ElectroServer from running, which isn’t easy when it’s running in the background.

But it’s actually only two processes, both starting with the word root (which is my current user name). The second process is the one that we just started by typing ps -ef | grep java and the first one is our ElectroServer, and that’s the one we have to kill. To do this we need the process id. I must admit I’m a bit confused why there are two numbers next to our process, 3492 and 3482. But I found that it worked for me using the first number.

kill-93492

But of course you’ll have to replace 3492 with whatever number you get. You can check it’s not running by typing ps -ef | grep java again, and this time you should no longer see the ElectroServer process :

root 3220817410 06:08 pts/0 00:00:00 grep java

So now I’ve killed the server process, I can now give ElectroServer more RAM, thankfully there’s this useful post on the ElectroServer wiki. I must admit I found it quite confusing, but for my Media Temple installation I used the Instructions for Unix. These instructions show you how to create a shell script that starts the server with more RAM. I had some trouble getting it to work, but that was because the capitalisation was different so check that you’re typing ElectroServer with the right caps – Unix is fussy.

Now it seems to be working again, but let me know if you see any more issues.